Data providers hit back at NBN Co

Geospatial data suppliers have hit out at suggestions from NBN Co that their products were to blame for significant rollout delays to Labor’s $37.4 billion national broadband network, claiming NBN Co chose the wrong tool for the job.

NBN Co signed a deal in March this year with geospatial data provider PSMA Australia to access its geocoded national address file (G-NAF), which contains a record of 13.2 million physical addresses.

But NBN Co chief executive
Mike Quigley
has since blamed alleged inaccuracies in the PSMA data for delays in rolling out the network. In late May, he told a Senate estimates committee hearing that up to 30 per cent of the data received was wrong.

“We have also been directing our contractors to walk down every street in every [fibre-serving area] in order to verify addresses," he said. “This is time-consuming, costly and itself prone to error."

PSMA chief executive Dan Paull said the G-NAF data being used by NBN Co was never intended for a project like rolling out the NBN. He said NBN Co had asked specifically for the G-NAF database, without checking if it was up to the job.

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“Our data is not fit for the purpose that NBN needs it for," he said. “So what they’re trying to do is make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And when Mike [Quigley] says that this data has problems with it he’s right – but only for the purposes he’s using it for."

Mr Quigley told parliamentary committees several times this year that the database from PSMA was a key reason behind network delays. “We need highly accurate data on where every premise is across the nation. This impacts almost every aspect of what we do, from planning and designing the network to building it and ultimately operating it," he said in May. At a Senate hearing in late October, Mr Quigley said integrating the address and database systems was a lot more work than previously expected. But he also said the data’s ­inaccuracy was not PSMA’s fault.

“By far the worst, most inaccurate, most difficult in terms of addresses is new developments – greenfields," he said. “You can imagine why: sometimes they are lots, they have got different names, the names change."

NBN Co is attempting to ramp up its rollout speed in order to start or complete construction at 758,000 homes and businesses by the end of this year. In late October, the company said it had passed or completed the network at 569,000 premises.

Mr Paull said he was a strong supporter of NBN Co but that the data it bought was not right for the task. “We never said ‘we will give you the dataset you need’. NBN Co came to us and said ‘we need your G-NAF’. And then they’ve come back and said ‘look this doesn’t do everything we need it to do.’

“We never made a commitment in relation to delivering everything that they needed. We have other data products that could assist but you’d need to amalgamate them together," he said.

Greg Hickey, business development manager at another major geospatial data provider, Esri Australia, said it was normal for the G-NAF database to lack the latest information because it depended on updates from local and state governments. Every infrastructure provider was aware of this.

“G-NAF is not an engineering database," he said. “It’s just for locating addresses so it should never be used for things like engineering."

In a statement NBN Co spokeswoman Rhonda Griffin said it used a variety of databases and was helping PSMA by updating G-NAF with new information as its staff rolled through Australia.

“The input of new physical data is not adding manual processes, but part of the standard operating procedure practically necessary for the work," he said. “This process has been factored into our construction timeframes.

“NBN Co has set its rollout plans as outlined in the Corporate Plan. These have not been “rushed" but planned over many months based on a ramp up period sufficient to meet our ten-year rollout timetable."